Insect trivia

» The animal responsible for the most human deaths worldwide is the mosquito.

» The animal with the largest brain in proportion to its size is the ant.

» The ant has the largest brain in the animal kingdom, in proportion to its size.

» The are more different kinds of insects on existence today than the total of all kinds of other animals put together.

» "Formication" is a hallucination that bugs or snakes are crawling on or under the skin, and is common to amphetamine and cocaine users. This hallucination is also referred to as "crank bugs."

» Bombyx mori, a silkworm moth, has been cultivated for so long that it can no longer exist without human care. Because it has been domesticated, it has lost the ability to fly.

» Drosophila, the small fruit fly, has been warmly received by the scientific community, mainly owing to the giant-sized chromosomes possessed by the cells of its salivary glands. These chromosomes, which can stretch to more than a mile long when unraveled, allow scientists to study DNA using only a sheet of white paper and a bright table lamp.

» A bee could travel 4 million miles (6.5 million km) at 7 mph (11 km/h) on the energy it would obtain from 1 gallon (3.785 liters) of nectar.

» A bee has five eyes, two large compound eyes on either side of its head, and three ocelli (primitive eyes) on top of its head to detect light intensity.

» A bumble bee flaps its wings 160 beats per second.

» A cockroach's heart is nothing but a simple tube with valves. The tube can pump blood backwards and forwards in the insect. The heart can even stop moving, apparently without harming the roach.

» A colony of white-footed ants varies in size from 400,000 to over 1 million individuals.

» A common housefly is faster--in one sense--than a jet airplane. The fly moves 300 times its body length in one second, while the jet, at the speed of sound, travels 100 times its body length in one second.

» A cricket an inch long has a chirp that is audible for nearly a mile.

» The Asian grasshopper can jump up to 15 feet, a distance the length of 18 of their 10-inch bodies.

» The average airspeed of the common housefly is 4.5 miles per hour. A housefly beats its wings about 20,000 times per minute.